General Question

What makes the back arrow not take you to where you started, no matter what?

Mostly no problem, when I’m on a website, the back arrow takes me to Google or wherever I was originally, and sometimes no way, no matter how many times I try. Is there a trick to make it stop refusing?

@rexacoracofalipitorius is correct about why this happens. The site forces your back button to refresh the current page instead. The more clicks their site gets, the better for their business.

I’ve more or less trained myself (on websites I’m not familiar with anyway) to not hit the back button at all, but instead either right-click, as @WestRiverrat suggested, or click and hold the back button (depending on your browser), until you can see the list of sites you’ve clicked on previously. Then move your mouse past all the “current page” or “adclick” or whatever addresses, to the one you want to go to. That gives you more control over your browsing.

I recommend the use of NoScript or similar script-blocker. Abuse of client-side scripting on Web pages is at ridiculous levels, and is a common attack vector (aka XSS attack). NoScript has the side-effect of allowing you to verify that the scripts running on a site actually come from there; when you run into offensive, workflow-breaking scripts like this I encourage you to complain frequently and loudly to the webmaster or site administrator. This goes double for my own sites.